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A Follow Up On The Ken Duncan Post

In the post I mentioned I'm not into PP and am just happy with my in camera jpeg photo's.

I also had no idea that so many people into photography for just the fun of it were so into PP.

The link shows what I don't get. This bloke is down the beach and the colour is what it is. Takes a few photo's and they look pretty accurate.
PP's till the colours are not within cooee of the original and lays claim to a great photo. While some of the photo's look really good, I just think, where's the integrity in that.

But he mentions that these colours are hidden in the raw file....is he suggesting the colours were actually there in the sky ?

Before I (even try to) address anything I will say that you should not
be exclusive to ideas. Look at his process and learn something from it.

In this case (having watched the whole video) I would suggest it may just
be that a raw file contains more information in it than does a jpeg.

I do not necessarily agree with his idea of PP in one particular step: that of increasing
the "vibrance". In that regard I agree with you about "what he saw".
>>Edited in: and this is because he "said" it made the shot "better".<<

Back to raw - and I am trying NOT to convince you to shoot in raw, but just to make a point.
There may have been times when you have "missed" a good shot because your highlights
were "blown" - ie, unrecoverable - or similarly that your shadows were too dark. There would be more
latitude for extreme tones (and color) in a raw file. That does not mean you cannot muck one up
though.

About the "hidden in the raw file" claim, It's hard to say just what he means by this. All I can relate to
is the idea that a raw file can record a wider range of tones and colors than a jpeg.

Take, say, a range of reds in a scene. A raw file would store that range in a lot more discrete bands than
a jpeg would. The jpeg would not be able to separate the reds beyond a certain level. In extreme cases
this would appear as "blotchiness" in an image.

When you get a fairly "good-looking and accurate" image in a final jpeg from a raw file, you have compressed
the image info into smaller bands. You would still be able to do some PP on the result, but not as much as you
cold with the raw.

Finally, though: the aim of photography is to get a satisfactory image from whatever process you use.

And from my point of view, you're not , but just learning (as are we all) about photography.

The first shot is straight out of the camera, purposely overexposed to pick up as much faint detail as possible.

If you scroll down, you will see the various iterations of just what the sensor captured. There were no colours added-in in Photoshop, just a process of teasing out the colours that the RAW file had captured.

The last one was an exercise to see how much red I could bring out in the shot. That colour was captured in the RAW file and the procedure is useful in processing astro shots as unmodified camera sensors are not very helpful in capturing the almost invisible reds in the H-Alpha range.

This blog by Peter Eastway outlines some interesting ideas in relation to what is a real photograph. For me, PP is no different to what went on in the darkroom in film and right back to the days of silver lined glass plates.

I think a problem with this type of discussion is that people get hung up on what is "a photograph" rather than what is "photography". Is a multi-shot panorama a photograph, or is a focus-stacked macro a photograph? I think probably not, but are they "photography"? In my view, yes.

Joel Grimes, who is quite a good 'traditional' photographer, made his name shooting dramatically lit subjects which he composited on to HDR backgrounds. Apparently colleagues claimed this wasn't real photography, and I think Grimes himself struggled with it. Until he started to think of himself as an artist who uses a camera. And once he'd made that jump a lot of the arbitrary barriers fell away...

I also had no idea that so many people into photography for just the fun of it were so into PP.

For me the PP is now half the fun. However, I have never pushed either the contrast or vibrance sliders to 100% as shown in the link you posted, not even 30%. I remember when I first joined this forum and looked in envy at some of the posts in the landscape section, thinking like most newbies that it must be their superior equipment that managed such amazing shots. Then, Dylan Toh posted a before and after shot and I realised how much the raw photo had been enhanced in PP. Peter Eastway's blog posted by Grant describes it perfectly and also how much was also done in the darkroom pre photoshop. I'm sure a lot of people think everything was straight out of the camera in those days when obviously it wasn't. I think it's all a matter of personal preference on how much PP you do. There will always be some who like it and some who don't - like most art photography is subjective.

Your OP really seems to be a question as to what benefits there might be to shooting RAW, or RAW + JPEG.

I always shoot RAW + LSF JPEG for a number of reasons.

The advantage of JPEGs is that there is minimal PP involved, assuming that everything went as expected. There is a huge downside when that doesn't happen, as WB and colour space are baked into the JPEGs, the files are only 8 bit, and JPEG compression is lossey, so much of the data originally captured by the sensor has been discarded during the conversion to JPEG.

The advantages of RAW are many. Colour space, bit depth and WB are all editable in PP without data loss are just for starters. There is also much more data to work with before data loss impacts noticeably on image quality.

Most sensors capture far greater DR in RAW compared with a JPEG from the same camera - sometimes up to 4 stops! This allows far more latitude for recovery of highlights, etc. I have a recent very ordinary documentary shot that illustrates this very well, but it's not uploaded yet.

It comes down to what you think a photograph should be showing depending on what you are trying to convey.

Pure reportage type photography should try to be as close to what you saw as possible, if that is what you are trying to convey. This type of photography is obviously most sought after for news reporting as they (should) be showing what was actually captured as they are trying to show what actually happened or the way the actual scene was at the time. However, this is not always the case and many famous examples have been disqualified due to photo manipulation, both small and large.

However, photography is not all about just recording what you see, it's not just about reportage type photography, it is also about art and art can be in many forms. What the guy in the video was showing us is that you can enhance a photograph to make it stand out and give it impact and make it more like art rather than reportage. I have no issue with that and it just depends on where you draw the line as to what looks too much over the top. The original photo was quite flat, but with some tweaking, it can really stand out and look interesting. You just have to decide whether you like that sort of thing or not.

It doesn't make any sense to say that the RAW file will capture colours that you cannot see. The RAW file may capture more colours than a jpeg, but each pixel is still only one colour. There are no hidden colours under that one colour. Post processing may change that colour to some other colour, but it doesn't reveal a hidden colour.

About 10 years ago I saw a documentary where scientists did some research as to whether all cultures saw the same colours, and their results where quite revealing, especially to me as a photographer. They went to Africa and showed a few colour wheels showing only two colours, one colour swatch was blue (according to western society) and about six swatches of green. The scientists then asked the members of the tribe to pick out the colour of the sky. The tribe members saw no difference in the colours. However, they also showed another colour wheel showing very similar colours of red, and they were very easily able to see the differences, where what I saw on the video, they were very closely coloured and difficult to distinguish between.

The documentary above helps provide a solution to why we all see colour slightly differenty and how we perceive those colours.

So, for example, if you are looking to sell your images in Dubai, probably the first place to begin would be to know what colours they are attracted too (other than Gold and Oil).

So what was the answer in the end, it was how our brains are trained and how and what our perception of colour is and how it changes as we age and from our cultural backgrounds. So the actual answer is, there is no actual correct colour, its what we percieve it to be and is therefore very subjective.

No, I didn't see the documentary, but it sounds interesting. I think colour is often described as being something that is created by our brains, rather than a property of nature. I have read that our colour perception is very influenced by language. If we have a word for a colour then we will see it as being different, if not then we won't. Women, who are exposed to many colour names with clothing, are better at recognising different colours than men. This seems to fit with the BBC doco.
I also remember reading how there is a large variation in the proportions of colour pigments (contained in rod cells) in our eyes, yet we talk about the same colours. Clearly, what is seen as (say) scarlet will vary from person to person but most of us know what is meant by scarlet (provided that you are not colour blind).
I am fascinated by colour, but, as you say, perception of colour is very much influenced by social and cultural factors.

Who knows? - But "semantics" does. In the opening minutes of the documentary they have unloaded a dozen or so
words without any definition, such as: "Color", "see the SAME way", "illusion". Then they juggle these around a bit,
and... That's as far as I got. Will watch the rest later.

We see the visible wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. There is a separate nucleus in the brain that interprets this information as colour.

AFAICS we all see colour slightly differently (e.g. the green/yellow boundary). About 10% of all people see well into the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, me being one of them. Ditto for the infrared part. Apparently, I also see a bit of this, but not much. Some people can see another person by their body heat alone in a completely dark test chamber.

Colour blindness is a whole separate topic.

Apparently the best colour vision on the planet is possessed by the mantis shrimp ...

The other thing is how accurately can we recall colours. Apparently not very well. We know it was red, but exactly which shade of red, we find difficult if not impossible to recall. A group of us was discussing this on a social shoot one day and one of the women said she could remember colours accurately, so we decided to put it to the test. Four of us looked at a plain blue cushion cover then headed off to Lincraft with the aim of buying a reel of sewing thread to match it. We all ended up with blue thread, four different shades, and none of them an exact match, not even as close as we would have expected.

We are seeing both what his still photo has recorded and what the video has recorded, what you cannot perceive is what his eye is actually seeing, our eyes have an amazing ability to filter light. What processing via PS is to bring out those colours. An example is a green bottle will look totally different with the way light hits it on dull days or bright backlit days, the ability of PS is to get the colour to what it actually is even if the day is dull or overly bright. Should we only be restricted to photograph on a day where light is perfect, or change that light in PS.